at least tangentially P-related: Class of all classes

David Payne dpayne1912 at hotmail.com
Fri May 9 00:28:33 CDT 2008


Mike confessed (more quickly than I):
> --- the other math thingie I feel the need to work on understanding
> is the "curve which is everywhere continuous and nowhere differentiable"...
> Nice ring to it.

That would be the Weierstrass function, which is "a pathological example of a real-valued function on the real line. The function has the property that it is continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weierstrass_function).

Which I understand even less (or rather, significantly less) than Russell's Paradox, although I am pleased to learn that "pathological" has a mathematical definition: "In mathematics, a pathological phenomenon is one whose properties are considered atypically bad or counterintuitive" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_%28mathematics%29).

So the Weierstrass function would presumably produce a ring that is actually not so nice. Would this ring be both random and not random? And therefore unnameable? How would Turner's settlers react to this unmapped frontier?

cf the not-naming and hypothetical explorations in AtD (474-475), wherein Deuce runs out on Lake after ... what exactly was actually said?:

In her own way of knowing and not knowing, she [Lake] would say something like, "your father still kickin, Deuce?"

[...]

But how ready did she feel to say, "You could've stood up."

[...]

Then he might have taken a short breath but no more. "Yeahp, that's what your Daddy tried, and look what they did to him."

"Excuse me, 'they,' what 'they was that again, Deuce?"

"What are you trying to say, Lake?"

"What are you trying not to?"
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